Catherine Wagner’s collections of poems include Nervous Device (City Lights, 2012) and three previous books from Fence. Her work appears in the recent edition of the Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetryand other anthologies. She teaches in the MA program in creative writing at Miami University and lives in Oxford, Ohio with her son.

Brenna York resides within the Peabody Manor in Oxford, Ohio. She released Mr. Ivy, a chapbook with Plumberries Press, this past June at the Midwest Press Festival in Milwaukee. Brenna is a graduate of EMU’s Creative Writing Program.

Matvei Yankelevich is the author of the poetry collection Alpha Donut (United Artists Books) and the novella-in-fragments Boris by the Sea (Octopus Books), and the translator of Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms (Overlook/Ardis). He is one of the founding editors of Ugly Duckling Presse, where he curates the Eastern European Poets Series. He is a member of the Writing Faculty at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College; in Fall 2013 he is Visiting Writer at Long Island University’s MFA in Creative Writing.

[excerpts from the long poem “Some Worlds for Dr. Vogt” and a film based on the same poem made in collaboration with Jeanne Liotta]

Kaplan Harris is an editor & scholar. He has forthcoming essays in the Cambridge Companion to American Modernist Poetry & an exhibition catalog on the clairvoyant conceptualist Hannah Weiner. He lives with his daughter in Buffalo, NY.

It excites the Creative Writing blog to announce the Creative Writing Graduate Showcase on Thursday, April 18th from six until eight in the evening. This blessed event will be hosted in the Carillon Room in the Halle Library on EMU‘s campus. The graduate performances promise to “blow down doors and hurl windows from the highest of towers.” Those performing include Nicholas “Mr. Electric Ocean” Mourning, Arthur “Ace” Challenger Oemke, and the articulated semtex-man Gerard Breitenbeck. Each will be performing an aspect of their Creative Masters Thesis projects. Mourning’s work is a an ethnographic mapping that bisects poetics and the electric self. Oemke’s can best be referred to as debauched fiction that attempts to undermine the authority of the sensorium. Capping the event, Breitenbeck will showcase new forms which break stale narrative sculptures and blast through our rectangular age with a re-percussive return to the early eighties.

Hats off to undergrads Sam Schimmel, Eric Corliss, Karen Thompson, Taylor Cyr, and Garret Stralnic from Christine Hume’s “Collaboration and Community Projects” and Linette Lao’s “Mixed Media” classes! Their work has received national attention in the New York Daily News. The members were from the collaborative group known as Operation Mongoose 2012 whose public work urges a remembrance of books and bookstores as a declining animal in our increasingly virtual world of books.

This week is jam packed with creative writing. Bathhouse reading series presents two performers. November 28th will be a reading featuring Dimitri Anatasopoulo, Camille Roy, and Rachel Levitsky.

Then, join us on the 29th for a panel discussion with our presenters moderated by our own Carla Harryman entitled: Intersections: Community, Politics and Art.

The eventtakes place at Roosevelt Hall from 4-6pm both days, so if you cannot make one there is another. For more information be sure to check out the reading series page.

But wait, there’s more! After the Bathhouse reading EMU’s Nicholas Mourning will be performing at Wednesday Night Sessions at the Mentobe Cafe in Farmington. This is the final reading of the year so be sure to catch it if you can. Other “fantastic” authors include Steve Gillis, Mary Minock, and Horam Kim. The event beings at 7pm and should run about one hour.

In other news Dr. Rob Halpern has recently been awarded the Sexiest Poem Award! Congrats to Rob, one of the Creative Writing faculty here at EMU.

Great news! Upcoming performances by the Temporal Arts Collective. The event, [ a n o c t a v e ], will be taking place Saturday November 17th at 9:00pm 106. N. Adams Apt. 2 in Ypsilanti. The event promises to be “an evening of contemporary poetry.” A mix of performers, alums, current undergrads, graduate students and innumerable others will be there. Those reading include, but are not limited to:

Kellie Nadler

David Boeving

G. Matthew Mapes

Jonah Mixon-Webster

John Farmer

Nick Compton

Miranda Metelski

and Kristen Gines

For more information about the Temporal Arts Collective check out their Facebook page.
If you cannot make it, fear not, the blog will send one of its staff writers to the event.

This past week was a big one for both students and faculty. Performers from each echelon exhibited work in the Detroit Metro Area. Both Dr. Christine Hume and CW Grad Student Danielle Etienne were among the artists performing.

On Thursday November 8th at 7:00pm at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD), the blog bore witness to both a Reading & Performance of Catherine Wagner & Christine Hume. Christine Hume started the night with a solemn incantation in a piece titled “Speech Talks Back,” afterwards Catherine Wagner performed poems from her new book, Nervous Device (City Lights, 2012).

During Dr. Hume’s piece, the gallery space was plunged into near dark, a single light illuminating the reading space. The audience sat hushed, and distracted. Dr. Hume read as simultaneous audio boomed from several speakers. At times ears were overwhelmed with the recording and at other times one could feel the reading more palpably. The effect was incongruous with the play between the two channels of narration creating a third space where the piece took form. The performance caught the audience in this third space, between the poles of navigation, the reading and the recording.

On Saturday November 10th at 8:00pm, Creative Writing Graduate Student Danielle Etienne read three short fiction pieces at Flip Salon in Ferndale. The exhibition/performance, titled Little Cloud Rising/STRAIGHT TO HELL, also featured artwork from artist Jacqueline Woodrich and live musical accompaniment. The space itself, Flip Salon, is indeed a hair salon. Artwork lined the walls and Ms Etienne read in the “waiting room” while the audience crowded around and watched from a variety of perches. As Ms Etienne read a banjo played on, the aura of white trash hillbilly that Ms Etienne articulates in her piece was brought twanging into the salon space. The audience hooted and hollered throughout the performance as Ms Etienne’s evocative descriptions filled them with laughter or caused them to cringe inwardly.

Each of the events was a remarkable demonstration of the breadth of diversity that is present in the EMU Creative Writing Program and the blog looks forward to more performances of both students and faculty.

The Gregory Brothers incoming to EMU campus November 28th. That’s one week after thanks giving. They will be “speaking” in the Student Center Grand Ballroom, their performance begins at 7:00pm. The Gregory Brothers, of auto tune the news fame, are sure to brighten a dreary November with their unique comedy.

The second event I wish to bring to the attention of the community is the Madhouse Poetry Night. More than a few Eastern Michigan University students will be performing at the Ugly Mug Friday October 26th starting at 7:00pm. Be aware, there is a one drink minimum. For more information I’ll leave this link here.

Also, in the interest of keeping the reader engaged I would like to address the banner art for the Creative Writing Blog. We are currently accepting photo-submissions to replace our banner art. If you have a picture/image you feel would work just perfectly in that space please submit via the submissions page.

One never knows what to expect when they show up to a reading, but you know when it’s a Prof’s house, that the A-game will be brought.

First Wendy Kramer presented, “The Morton Salt Girl Monologue: NaCl and the Meaning of Her Mark” accompanied by collaged trademark images she had created of the changing icon over the years. In a performance including visual and auditory cohesion and dissonance, she read both stage direction and script of a constructed text for the girl. This was followed by David Buuck who presented “We are all Sound: Poetics and Public Space in the Occupy Oakland Movement” which expressed an “on the scene” accounting of the challenges of creating and distributing poetics that can attempt to convey, do justice to, or maybe even not to do too much justice to, the movement.